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An intersting article.

However, that is only one perspective on viewing things like Hieroshima and Dresden vis-a-vis the nature of the enemy we were facing in WW2. The reality is in the perception.

I think you have to taylor your tactics to fit the opponent with which you are dealing. You can't fight a war with savages like Al Quaida or NAZIs using Marquis of Queesnbury rules and expect to win. Not doing so doesn't somehow "degrade" us. As long as we only retaliate measure for measure, and remember not to employ such tactics against other more "honorable" foes as an acceptable practise, we are O.K.

Its quite curious Churchill made the comments he did.

Aside from much much earlier examples like Indian "reservations," in America, the British in the Boer War deliberately employed concentration camps for the first time against "civilized" people and targeted non-combatants - women and children, the wives and offspring of Boers - who suffered horrendous casualties in an aggressive, imperial, immoral war by Imperial Britain against people who were merely defending their independence - the Boers.

Churchill was a war correspondent in that conflict.

This reminds me of the scene in Dr. Strangelove in which the hapless, Adlai Stevenson-type President, one Merkin Muffley, is warning the Russian Premier over a telephone line about an impending unsanctioned nuclear attack:

...I'm sorry too, Dmitri. I'm very sorry. (Listens)

All right! You're sorrier than I am! But I am sorry as well. I am as sorry as you are Dmitri. Don't say that you are more sorry than I am, because I am capable of being just as sorry as you are. So we're both sorry, alright? All right.

Even in a satire more than forty years old, the morally unsure, ever-apolgetic nature of modern liberalism is evident.

A thoughtful article on the morality of war.

Her wonderings beg the question; what is moral? If there is no ethically absolute than we do live in a ethical relative world where there can be no moral high ground. If, however, there is an ethical absolute - a perfect moral standard that is a reflection of the creator then she is musing in an inappropriate manner. If there are moral absolutes one must reason from their revelation not toward them and certainly not attempting to hide from them.

if the civilized society is to prevail over the barbarous one, it will necessarily and tragically be degraded by the experience as a vital cost of victory.

As she goes on to say, the very act of war is, at its heart, barbaric. In times of war, a "civilized" society (at least that part that participates in the war) ceases to be "civilized." In fact, any restraint on killing or otherwise disabling the enemy becomes a liability, counterproductive. Granted, there are constraints that lessen the barbarity -- eschewing torture, humane treatment of prisoners, limited attrition of civilians -- but these are all relative. Nothing you can do to war makes it civilized. So when you fight it, fight it all the way. And win all the way. By ending it as quickly as possible, you can return to a state of civility more quickly. And you win quickly by utterly destroying your enemy's ability to wage war ... mercilessly, efficiently, unceasingly.

The question is, did, for example, bombing Dresden to defeat Hitler or, in the Pacific War, dropping two nuclear bombs to force Japan to stop fighting, make the Allies into barbarians?

Barbarians are always other peoples.